News flash: If you live by a park, you might see people using it

Marc Fisher of the Washington Post documents some of the fighting that has gone on in DC, and elsewhere, over lights in public parks and other facilities turned on for the purposes of youth sports leagues.

Fisher, rightly, says having lights on for a few hours at night is not going to kill anybody, even though opponents make it sound like the fields are lit up with spent nuclear rods that are draining uranium through their windows. He links to a particularly high-larious site put out (but not updated in a while) by presumably some crabby apple in Glendora, Calif. The best part is the sound files of what you might hear at a park during a game — cheering, I tell you, cheering!

Get off my publicly financed lawn!

Fisher rightly takes down the opponents as overreacting, kid-hating, snooty douchebags. Hey, if you don’t like the sounds of kids playing, don’t live by the park! In fact, I would put these folks in the same category as:

— People who live by the airport and complain about the noise.
— People who live in a bustling downtown area, and complain about the traffic and parking
— People who live in a farming area and complain about the smell
— People who move out to a suburb’s Sphincterous Acres subdivision and complain when more houses and shops are built (Note: this isn’t so much of a problem lately.)

Certainly, a youth sports league using a park should be a good neighbor, doing things like cleaning up after itself, ensuring parking is adequate and not playing all through the night, just like a farmer would be a good neighbor to do something to mitigate the smell of hundreds of thousands of pooping chickens. But, sheesh, if you want to complain about goings-on in a park, complain about raving bands of hooligans, sexual liaisons on the sly and leftover needles. Not kids playing ball.